Jonathan Kew wrote:
>
> I confess that I didn't really understand that message at the time. So
> I've just re-read it, and also looked up some MARC21-related
> materials. Now I'm ready to say that I disagree with this position.
LOL, i'd agree with your disagreement.
>
> The web developer who is developing processes that depend on a
> particular normalization form, whether NFC, NFD, or some other custom
> transformation, must face that burden anyway. Otherwise the process
> will never be robustly interoperable with the wider world of encoded
> text.
>
In theory, and on internal projects this is how we handle all our stuff.
But i do think you're overestimating the knowledge of the average web
developer.
> We may wish this burden didn't exist at all, but it does (and won't be
> going away any time soon -- Unicode is here to stay). And software
> developers -- rather than web page and stylesheet authors -- are the
> right people to carry that burden.
I'd partly disagree.
There are tools out there that allow developers to handle normalisation
in a flexible manner.
There are tools out there that allow developers to handle normalisation
in an inflexible manner (enforcing a particular normalisation form).
Many tools do handle normalisation.
I doubt it will be possible to get all software developers to take it on
bored.
Ultimately a web page author or stylesheet working with multiple
languages, needs to know what their tools actually do, as a bare minimum.
And I'd except much more knowledge from our internal web developers.
Andrew Cunningham
Senior Manager, Research and Development
Vicnet
State Library of Victoria
328 Swanston Street
Melbourne VIC 3000
Ph: +61-3-8664-7430
Fax: +61-3-9639-2175
Email: andrewc@vicnet.net.au
Alt email: lang.support@gmail.comhttp://home.vicnet.net.au/~andrewc/http://www.openroad.net.auhttp://www.vicnet.net.auhttp://www.slv.vic.gov.au